The Effects of Radiation Feedback on Early Fragmentation and Multiplicity

Abstract

Forming stars emit a significant amount of radiation into their natal environment. While the importance of radiation feedback from high-mass stars is widely accepted, radiation has generally been ignored in simulations of low-mass star formation. I use ORION, an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) three-dimensional gravito-radiation-hydrodynamics code, to model low-mass star formation in a turbulent molecular cloud. I demonstrate that including radiation feedback has a profound effect on fragmentation and protostellar multiplicity. Although heating is mainly confined within the core envelope, it is sufficient to suppress disk fragmentation that would otherwise result in low-mass companions or brown dwarfs. As a consequence, turbulent fragmentation, not disk fragmentation, is likely the origin of low-mass binaries.

4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 270: Computational Star Formation

References in corpus (5)

• On the Role of Disks in the Formation of Stellar Systems: A Numerical Parameter Study of Rapid Accretion
• Stellar Multiplicity and the IMF: Most Stars Are Single
• The Effects of Radiative Transfer on Low-Mass Star Formation
• The Importance of Radiative Feedback for the Stellar Initial Mass Function
• Equations and Algorithms for Mixed Frame Flux-Limited Diffusion Radiation Hydrodynamics

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The contribution of binary star formation via core-fragmentation on protostellar multiplicity
• The impact of episodic outflow feedback on stellar multiplicity and the star formation efficiency
• Star Formation